


To Byzantium

by MangoMartini



Series: Sailing [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-31 19:06:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MangoMartini/pseuds/MangoMartini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Picks up ten years after Lost at Sea. Steve has moved on. He has a job at a publishing company, lives with his best friend, and hasn't seen Tony Stark since senior prom. That is, until Tony Stark shows up at Steve's work. As it turns out, it's impossible to move on from someone who keeps showing back up in your life. </p><p>Originally written for starspangledsprocket's prompt: Tony is actually really reserved around people he genuinely cares about. This causes Steve to believe his affection for Tony is unrequited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starspangledsprocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starspangledsprocket/gifts).



Steve sat towards the back of the meeting room with his dog-eared notebook in his lap. He was currently working on a cartoon doodle of a turtle on a skateboard and not listening to the story planning meeting going on around him. They’d let him know when they needed him, and until then he’d keep working on this and eventually decide whether or not the turtle needed sunglasses. 

As the art director for the magazine New York Monthly, he had to be at these meetings, as much as he didn’t see the point to it. Supposedly it was to get ideas for how to design the covers and format the larger stories, but really all Steve did was draw turtles doing various sports--a metaphor for the pace of these meetings.

After all, the writers would normally spend most of the meetings arguing over the cover stories, or even over titles, so there was no point coming up with a design only to have it scrapped ten minutes later.

Steve was focused on giving this turtle sunglasses, until the editor-in-chief Maria Hill said something from the front of the room that had Steve suddenly blurting out, "Wait, what?" Because he couldn’t have just heard what he thought he heard.

The whole room looked at him. While he was turning a deep shade of red and closing his notebook, Maria sighed. "Please tell me you know who he is. Tony Stark? Billionaire playboy who’s been in and out of rehab and on the cover of at least one magazine every month since he was sixteen. He knocked up that model a few years back and she made him keep the kid? Come on, Steve,” Maria said, snapping her fingers, “keep up."

"He's our next month's cover story," came a quiet voice from next to Steve. Bruce Banner was one of the senior copyright editors, one of those impressive and nearly-scary people who could rattle off all the proper ways to use a semicolon without even blinking. He was also Steve’s roommate. 

Steve looked over and, from the notes he saw on Bruce’s paper, taken down in impeccable handwriting, saw that Steve was in charge of the photo shoot for the Tony Stark story.

"Why?"

Maria frowned. “Rogers, are you asking me why I’m putting our art director in charge of a photoshoot?” The room, mostly the interns who had somehow snuck in to try and feel important, snickered. 

Maria sighed and didn’t wait for Steve to answer. "He's been clean for almost three years now after being in and out of rehab most of his life, and that scandal over whether or not he bought his MIT degree isn’t selling anymore. Marketing had a meeting with the editors and decided it was a good time to do an in-depth character piece." 

She switched to a smile then, the kind Steve had only ever seen when she had someone's car towed for parking in her spot. Or maybe on Shark Week. "And given that he's bound to relapse at any moment, we can get this piece and then have enough to report again about how it's such a tragedy that he’s relapsed and all that nonsense. Two stories for the price of one from this media cash cow."

"Maybe if we get lucky, he'll just kill himself." The comment was biting, something one of those jaded interns in the back said too loudly to another intern, but it caused the entire room to laugh again.

The room except Steve and Bruce. Bruce just looked over to Steve with a concerned expression, as if he wasn’t even sure he was allowed to try and comfort Steve. The only reason he even knew anything at all about this was because of the one night a few years ago when Steve had gotten disgustingly drunk and explained it all to Bruce. Why else would the celebrity wedding of Tony Stark and a Victoria Secret model make Steve so upset? Even if it had only lasted for two months, long enough for her to trade Tony an infant for her part of the prenup.

The meeting lasted only a few more minutes, and Steve was silent for all of them. When it was over, Steve pulled Bruce by the arm into the break room.

Bruce tensed as Steve stared down at him. Bruce stared back up, nearly cowering, brown eyes wide, looking like Steve was about to mug him. Even his hair seemed to be shaking.

"What the hell? How long have the writers been working on this? How long have you known about this?" Steve tensed his fingers. “We live together. I bought your pizza last night. You can’t just do this to me!” 

Bruce opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. "See, this is why I didn’t tell you. I knew you'd react like this. I know how you are with…this." Bruce moved his hands up and down in front of Steve. He wasn’t one for conflict at all--Steve had had to get Bruce drunk to even get him to admit that he wanted Steve to start helping buy toilet paper. 

Steve sighed and backed away from Bruce. He turned his attention on the coffee machine, pouring in water and starting it up. "You should have at least given me a little warning. Who did you even have do the cover design for this?" Because if Steve was doing the cover, he would have known about it by now. 

Bruce muttered something that sounded like the name of his assistant art director, or maybe a noodle dish.

And then, as if on cue, she walked in. All fiery curls and a well fitted grey pencil skirt, and Bruce looked like he was about ready to faint back onto the rack of drying mugs on the counter. Bruce was, Steve had learned in the years of living with him, worse than women than he was with confrontation.   
"He e-mailed me about it, actually," she said, slight hint of a Russian accent in her sultry voice. There were rumors that she used to be a KGB agent floating around for awhile, Steve had never believed it. No superspy would ever end up working in Buffalo designing layouts for articles about New York’s best pies. She nodded at Steve as she walked past him to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water.

"According to the e-mail,” Natasha went on to say, sipping her water and somehow managing to not smudge her dark lipstick, “billionaire playboy geniuses make you…uncomfortable?” The corners of her mouth curled up. "That's cute. The file is your inbox waiting approval, but I think it will work. That is if either of you ever check your e-mail." She turned her gaze over to Bruce. "My personal number has been in his inbox for a week and he hasn't called yet.”

Bruce’s mouth dropped open like it had suddenly developed a magnetic attraction to the tile floor.

But Natasha just screwed the cap back on her bottle of water and raised her eyebrows at them. “I'll see you both later this afternoon."

 

Steve and Bruce watched her leave, and then turned to each other.

"You told her!" Steve wasn’t sure it was possible to be more upset. The rule about drunken roommate confessions was secrecy, after all. 

Bruce ducked his head to stare at the floor where Natasha had once been standing. "Y-you know how she is. She's, well, she said she needed a good reason to keep this from you, and that you should know regardless, and I said you shouldn't, and then she looked at me." He made a sound like helium leaking out of a cheap balloon. “I only told her what I had to.”

"You are the worst roommate I’ve ever had, you know that?" Steve pinched the bridge of his nose.  
“Worse than that weird neo-Nazi you roomed with in college?” Bruce asked, attempting a chuckle and growing louder when Steve joined him. 

“Okay I take it back. You’re the second worst roommate I’ve ever had. No one’s worse than that creep Schmidt.”

Bruce looked up finally. "So will you be in charge of the photo shoot? There's still time to try and get out of it, I think. Do you have any sick days left? I tried to get Natasha to take all of it, but she said she couldn’t. Sorry."

"Wait," Steve said, looking down at Bruce and narrowing his gaze. He had a good three inches on the other man, though with the way Bruce tended to slouch it always seemed like four or five. Before Steve spoke again, Bruce made the mistake of looking up, and then Steve had him trapped in a death glare like a bunny in front of an eighteen wheeler. "What do you mean you think there's still time? When the hell is he supposed to be getting here?"

Steve had assumed Tony would be here in a week, maybe two. That he would have time to plan and prepare and meditate or do whatever it took to be able to act like a consummate professional around the man he still sketched late at night.

"What the hell are you two still doing in here?" Maria's voice rang out against the off white walls and linoleum floor. "Stark will be here in fifteen minutes! Get coffee when you’re done or get one of those interns to do it for you. God knows they’re never busy enough." She left as quickly as she arrived, heels clicking against the hardwood floor in a staccato melody. 

Bruce gulped audibly.

"I take it back. You are the worst roommate ever," Steve announced, shaking his head. "He's going to be here in fifteen minutes!" He began pacing the small break room. "Fifteen minutes! I can't, it's just, you know, I just, I don’t have the right lenses or the screens and you know those new hires can’t get it right without me there—"

"Hey," Bruce said, stopping Steve's pacing with a quiet hand on his arm. "You don't have to be here. I’m Natasha can cover if you suddenly get sick or something. Just, uh, go out for coffee or something for an hour or so. By the time you get back he'll be gone." It was the perfect sort of Bruce Banner plan, the one that avoided all conflict and involved coffee. 

Steve nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a good plan." If it was anyone else but Tony, Steve would have sucked it up and done it. He had done a Toddlers and Tiaras photo shoot a few months ago, stone cold sober even though half the crew were passing around flasks. But this was different. 

Ten minutes later, Steve had everything in order. He had skimmed over Natasha's ideas, sitting nicely in his e-mail inbox, and sent her a quick okay. He had given instructions to an intern to hold his calls for the next hour or so because he was suddenly feeling ill, e-mailed that to Maria so she would be the one to tell Natasha, and had packed his sketchbook and pencils into his messenger bag. 

An hour at a coffee shop sketching people as they walked by sounded wonderful, especially when it meant he got to avoid running into the self proclaimed 'genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.' He was a twenty-eight year old man running from his problems and, given the choice between that and facing Tony Stark, he couldn’t find it in himself to be ashamed of that choice. 

Because of course Steve had kept up with all the news; it was hard not to. Tony was the darling of MIT until he was on drugs, and then he barely graduated with a degree some people still claimed was false or bought. But then he was clean, at least until he was in rehab for alcohol. Then was clean again before he knocked up some underwear model and married her in the most lavish shotgun wedding the tabloids had ever seen. 

After another stint in rehab after the divorce—alcohol, not drugs this time—Tony was twenty five and a somewhat-stable father. Stark Industries stocks were even doing better than ever.

All while that had been going on, Steve had kept living his life, amazed at the way someone’s world can completely fall apart while yours continues to turn inauspiciously. Steve got into art school, dabbled in graphic design. He visited Peggy over at Cambridge twice and the second time they saw Phantom of the Opera in London. He got an internship at New York Monthly and worked his way up to art director. He had a gym membership and the entire staff at the coffee place down the street from his apartment knew his order. Steve had his own life. 

Just because he had kept up with Tony's press didn’t mean anything, Steve told himself, not the way it used to mean something. He was good. 

He was better, in fact. Steve had moved out of that small town to the big city. He lived in a nice apartment with a totally normal, if not awkwardly shy, roommate who always put his dishes in the sink and his shoes in the shoe cubby. Once every few months, Steve even went on a date. His life was perfect.

The elevator arrived with a ding, and out stepped a young boy with shaggy brown hair and a red sweater. The child had a handheld game held up close to his face, and was pressing the buttons with the sort of furious dexterity that Steve had never managed. 

The child looked up at Steve, who was too stunned to walk past the boy to the elevator. Indifferent, the elevator slowly closed and moved on, trapping the two of them together.

"You're really tall," the boy said, looking Steve up and down. His face scrunched up and his nose wrinkled before focusing back on his video game. "Are you a wrestler? Or a stranger? I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. Or watch wrestling. Are you a wrestler?"

Steve stared at the child as if he had just spoken another language. He had not ever been around children long enough to know if he was good with them or not, and now, when he was trying to fake an illness to leave work, did not seem to be the best time to find out. 

But the child had paused his game and now kept staring at Steve, and after coughing to clear his throat, Steve tried remembered how his vocal chords worked.

"No," he said first, “I’m not a wrestler. Or a, uh, stranger.” Clearly he had to return this child to his mother, or at least to an intern, without making this seem like the opening to an episode of Law and Order. “My name is Steve," he said, not sure what the proper protocol was when introducing oneself to someone under the average intern age. Steve doubted kids this age shook hands. What was he? Four? Five?

Steve shifted his book bag on his shoulder; it felt heavier now that he was sure he would never get to see that café until he had taken care of this child. "What’s your name? What are you doing here?"

Something went bing and the child took another toy out of his pocket, and began poking at it with his chubby thumbs as he talked. "I'm Peter." The beeping stopped and he put whatever it was back into his pocket. "Everyone was being boring, so I went to go explore." He looked back over his shoulder at the elevator and then back at the game. "This was the highest button I could reach."

He couldn’t believe what Peter had just said. Clearly whoever was parenting this child was doing a terrible job. Maybe it was someone from accounting. 

"Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers? Or not to wander off?" Steve blurted out before he could help it. Did kids just wander off now? He had no idea. He certainly didn’t when he was a child—at least not more than a few houses away.

Apparently that wasn’t the right thing to say, because it made Peter pout. "You're pretty boring for a wrestler," he accused, pointing a finger at Steve. 

That was it. "C'mon," Steve said, draping a hand over Peter's shoulder to steer the child back towards the elevator and hoping that he didn’t look like a pedophile on the security camera. "I'm bringing you back to your mother. Where is she?"

“I don’t know,” Peter replied, but he let Steve maneuver him into the elevator all the same. “Hey, I just beat the fifteenth level. Cool, huh?” Peter proceeded to tell Steve all about this video game he was playing, and Steve nodded and listened as well as he could. He wasn’t much of a fan of video games.

Finally, the elevator went ping and they were on the ground floor of the building. Steve could just drop the child off at the front desk like he was some sort of misplaced package, and then sneak off before Maria or Natasha saw him. 

Or at least that was the plan, until Steve came face to face with a panicked-looking, red faced Maria Hill.

"Steve! I thought you left! You haven't seen a—" She stopped mid sentence when she saw Peter following closely behind Steve. "Oh thank god you’ve found him."

"He wandered into the elevator," Steve explained, wondering why Maria was so upset. He knew for a fact that Peter wasn’t her child. 

Peter looked up at Maria, saw the face she was making, and started staring at his shoe laces. Steve wanted to do the same. Maria looked like she might kill them both. "Who is this—" But Steve never got to finish his question. 

"His dad would have had us all out of a job if we had lost him. It was my job to look after him, and he wandered off." Maria grabbed Peter's wrist.

Peter wriggled and pouted. "You're boring,” he groaned, “and you smell funny."

Steve couldn’t believe it. It made him think of his own childhood—not that his grandmother would never have tolerated him acting this way, but there was something familiar to it. But what sort of parent would give their son video games and let him wander off like that and be so, well, rude to people?

"Peter Parker Stark!"

Both Peter and Steve's head whipped around to look at the source of the voice. Peter looked guiltily back at his shoes. Steve felt like his eyes were about to jump out of his head and roll around on the floor, or possibly explode like white and blue goo grenades.

There was Tony Stark, looking like he had just stepped off the pages of a magazine photo shoot. Considering he was in the middle of shooting for New York Monthly, he probably just did. His brown hair was perfectly combed, facial hair trimmed, and his tailored suit was wrinkle-free. The suit was black, with a red collared shirt and gold tie. The colors suited him, Steve thought, before realizing that he was staring and trying to decide if that was the same gold tie Tony had worn when he had kissed him that night at prom. 

He finally noticed that Tony was staring back at him.

There was a silence, as everyone around them stopped what they were doing. A circle of people formed around Steve and Tony, who were just staring at each other. There was a palpable tension, seeping under everyone's collars and into their socks. It was uncomfortable and viscous, and Steve had no idea how to break it.

"Are you okay, dad?" Pete asked, tugging at the end of Tony’s suit jacket . 

That did it. Of course. It all made sense now, Steve thought, as he watched Tony pick up Peter, poke him on the nose, and call him buddy. Tony was his father.   
That was when Bruce showed up. He pushed his way, gently, through the crowd to stand next to Steve. He put his arm around Steve's shoulder. "Sorry Maria," Bruce explained hastily, eyes darting around. "Steve isn't feeling very well, and he was just about to go home. Probably something he ate. Come on, Steve,” Bruce added, guiding Steve with his arm, “I'll walk you out."

Steve let himself be led from the building under Bruce's gentle guidance. The cool afternoon air brushed over his face and he took a deep breath of it. The air tasted like sunshine and baking bread from the café down the street, and it made Steve want to vomit. His knees felt weak but when he closed his eyes all he could see was Tony, burned into his vision, like looking at Tony was as bright as staring at the sun.

"I thought you left!" Bruce said, when they were far enough from the front door of the office building. 

"I was going to," Steve explained after a moment, opening his eyes just to rub them with the heels of his hands. "But then I ran into Peter."

"Who?"

"Peter Stark."

"Ah. Right." Bruce paused, pushed his glasses up his nose, and assessed Steve. Steve had no idea what Bruce was looking for, by staring at Steve as if he were a poorly punctuated article, but in the end Bruce just sighed. "Well, you need to leave. After everything you've drunkenly told me about Tony Stark over the years, I have been doing my best to try not to punch him ever since he got here. And you know me, Steve. I don't punch people. So I don’t want to know what you would do if you got your hands on him."

"You’d actually hit someone for me?" Steve asked, smiling a little.  
"Well, no. You know what I mean. Look, just go back home. I will finish help Natasha finish up this photo shoot and when I get back we can order takeout and watch trashy television." Bruce gave Steve's arm a comforting squeeze.

"You’d better ask her out soon,” Steve said. “I mean, for all I know this is just an overly-dramatic way to make it so the two of you can work together for the afternoon.”

Bruce grimaced. "Yeah, well, we’ll see if I can do it without passing out."

So Steve went home, leafed through some takeout menus, and thought all the while that that would be the last he would ever see of Tony Stark—in person, at least. It would be a fluke, an accident, something that would not be repeated. It wasn’t like billionaires just hung around New York magazine publishing offices when they didn’t have to.

That is, until Tony texted him later that night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Picks up ten years after Lost at Sea. Steve has moved on. He has a job at a publishing company, lives with his best friend, and hasn't seen Tony Stark since senior prom. That is, until Tony Stark shows up at Steve's work.
> 
> Originally written for starspangledsprocket's prompt: Tony is actually really reserved around people he genuinely cares about. This causes Steve to believe his affection for Tony is unrequited.

The first text message was innocent enough.

It was after Bruce and Steve had regrouped at the apartment, talked about the shoot, ordered Chinese takeout and Steve had even convinced Bruce (after two beers) to send a text message to Natasha, asking her out for a drink. They had retired to their individual rooms with Bruce shaking because it had been twenty minutes and she hadn't texted him back, despite Steve reassuring him that at 10:43 at night, Natasha was probably already asleep.

Steve had done his evening routine of pajamas and teeth brushing before sitting in bed and sketching in one of the many sketchbooks piled up on his bedside table.  
Except that now, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, he was sketching a familiar face with new patterns of facial hair into a sketchbook that had up until this point only contained nature sketches and the odd turtle. But it felt so familiar, the curves and the lines coming out of his pencil that all fell together to create this new yet familiar Tony Stark. Steve hated that it was so easy to draw Tony even after all these years.

Steve was working on the shading of Tony's jaw when his phone buzzed, rattling the bedside table with the telltale noise of a new text message. Steve sat his sketch book down and picked his phone up from the bedside table, wondering who would be texting him this late at night.

(10:57)  
Thanks for finding Peter today. Totally didn’t want to have to get your number from your boss, but you left before I could thank you in person. So yeah. Thank you.

Tony didn’t sign the text message, but he didn’t have to. Steve read the entire thing in his voice anyway. It made him scrunch his face into a frown and put the phone back on his bedside table, not even bothering to reply. He didn’t even know what to say even if he wanted to reply, which he didn’t want to do. 

Steve had picked up his pencil again and was working on the detail of Tony's stupid tie when his phone buzzed again. Steve almost didn't pick it up, but after only twenty seconds the pencil was down and the phone was back in his hand.

(10:59)  
And don't, like, put my number on Twitter or anything. This is my personal cell. Great power, great responsibility, all that jazz.

Steve shook his head as he looked down at the glowing screen. This was Tony Stark, texting him as if they were still friends, talking to him like they didn’t have their past. 

Twice Steve started to draft a reply, and twice he deleted his attempts. This was the Tony Stark who had made his life hell for so many years, who had kissed him out of the blue and nearly ruined his prom night, whose face he couldn’t help but look for in every first date he ever had. Steve would not text him back, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

The next morning at work, Steve was juggling putting together the photo shoot from yesterday with an emergency cover design for a custom publishing job that had apparently thought it was alright to just send some low resolution clipart pictures to use as their cover design, and all thoughts of Tony Stark texting him were out of his head.

The photos were, like everything Natasha did, perfect. Tony looked just the right amount of suave, mature, and even relatable. She had even managed to get a picture of Tony holding Peter, though there was a note attached that said it was not for the magazine article. At least something was going right that day. Steve made a mental note that he probably owed Natasha coffee for the rest of the foreseeable future. 

 

The rest of the office was just as much of a madhouse. It was close to deadlines, the Stark article needed major rewrites, half of the ads weren’t accounted for, and two toilets in the women’s bathroom clogged. At one point an intern even started crying when the copier wouldn’t work. Steve was sketching so furiously for the new cover design, in between editing shots, that he managed to freeze the art program synced to his tablet.

That had been the final straw. He put his work down, took a deep breath, and went out in search of hot caffeine before he threw his tablet against the wall.

Ten minutes later, with coffee in hand, Steve returned to his desk and his problems. He looked at his cellphone to check the time while his tablet reset—why did he have four text messages?

(8:43)  
So you could have at least texted me back to let me know I got the right number from your boss.

(8:51)  
Though my PR person says my number's not on the web yet, so that’s a plus.

(9:34)  
Should I have waited three days or something before texting you? Texted you a bouquet emojii? Or are you just ignoring me?

(10:01)  
Ignoring me, right. Got it.

"Steve, here are the new contracts you need to sign, the ones I e-mailed you about three days ago," Natasha announced, standing in front of his desk with a stack of papers in her manicured hands.

He jumped at her voice, fumbling and almost dropping his phone only to catch it again, like it was some sort of confused canary trying to fly away. Steve tried to glare at Natasha and—he looked at her feet—her Louboutin heels, but he didn’t have the strength. It was unnatural for someone to be so silent in heels such tall heels. 

"Contracts, right. Just leave them here and I promise I’ll get to them before lunch if I survive that long."

She placed the stack of papers on the edge of his disheveled desk. "Are you alright? You look off. Is this because of the text message?"

"You know that Tony Stark has been texting me?" Steve blurted out, tired and stressed and unable to ask. He was going to elaborate, to tell someone in hopes of lightening the burden it was putting on him on top of the shoot and the cover and now the contracts, but the look Natasha gave him made him think that he most likely didn’t have to.

“I meant about Bruce texting me,” she clarified. “But I can see how that has you upset as well. Don’t worry,” Natasha added, when Steve tried to say something else, “I won’t tell anyone. Just focus on your work, okay? I didn’t cover for you yesterday to have you drop the ball today.”

Steve was almost too impressed that Bruce had managed to keep texting Natasha last night without continued moral support to care that he had told her about Tony texting him. Almost.

Natasha pursed her lips. "Or just do what you want," she paused, and Steve knew what would come after. He knew that tone. Do what you want she would say, before letting him know in some way or another exactly what she thought he should do. "But keep in mind that Tony Stark was ranked the most eligible billionaire bachelor by Forbes this year."

Steve's mouth fell open. It was still hard to reconcile that Tony Stark with the one that spread rumors around that Steve was a locker room perv in high school.

"You haven’t looked over the text for the cover yet, have you? It says so right there, next to a blurb about he's managed to stay out of rehab for so long,” Natasha said. “Get the contracts back to me by five today." Natasha disappeared, leaving a whiff of expensive perfume in her wake.

Steve ignored the contracts, and picked up his phone. He hadn’t gone on a date in months, and that date had been a disaster. The other guy had been uninterested, and Steve had been distracted with issues at work. So yeah, maybe his love life wasn’t perfect—or existent, really. And maybe the majority of the guys he tried to date had brown hair and brown eyes and he had a type, that was all. There was nothing wrong with having a type. 

Slowly, with great care and understanding of exactly what he was going to do, Steve crafted a response.

(11:03)  
Not ignoring you. Busy day at work.

There, he thought, as he watched the short message send. Short and to the point, with proper grammar reflective of a twenty eight year old man who was doing well for himself and was absolutely not still hung up on his high school crush at all.

Steve had only signed two of the contracts before his phone buzzed again. He dropped the pen down and grabbed his phone so fast that he made himself wince at the desperation of it all, like a starving dog finally being fed scraps. That was what it was, conversation scraps from a man who had ignored him for a decade. 

 

(11:04)  
So no chance of getting lunch with you today, then?

His mouth fell open. Steve read the text five times to make sure he hadn’t misinterpreted it. No, he hadn’t. That was just Tony Stark, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, asking him out to lunch via text message.

No, Steve thought, not out to lunch. That sounded too much like a date, like romance, like hasty daydream. Tony probably wanted to buy lunch for Steve in front of the press and thank him again for finding his son, something like that. It was fake and not what Steve wanted, just like Tony always had been.

As much as Steve hated it, the idea of getting to even sit at the same table as Tony made his stomach start using his intestines as a skipping rope.

Because he was over Tony. He had been over Tony for years. That was why he had never tried to contact him, not since that one night at prom where, well, where Tony had kissed him. Tony had been drunk, Steve told himself after that night. Drunk and starting the horrible path of self destruction that the media had so diligently documented.

Steve Rogers did not need Tony Stark in his life anymore. He was happy. He had friends and great job and place to stay and a box full of half finished sketches of Tony under his bed that he pretended he only hung on to because they might be useful in a portfolio one day. And who cares if Steve got blackout drunk when Tony got married? That could have been a coincidence, and not a desperate attempt to avoid the pictures of the way Tony held her on nearly every television channel and social media platform. 

With all that in mind, Steve slowly texted back a single word, and then another.

(11:10)  
No

(11:11)  
Sorry

Steve looked down at the second message he sent and worried his bottom lip between his teeth. He wasn’t sure about the sorry. The first messaged seemed too blunt without it, but he still wasn’t sure he if he was sorry that he was turning down Tony Stark for lunch. He wasn’t sorry; he was relieved. 

Forgetting the contracts for now, Steve turned to his computer and opened the file that Natasha had e-mailed him of the finalized cover design with Tony Stark on the front.

Natasha had clearly chosen the best picture for the cover. There Tony was, over a plain, dark blue background that complimented his tanned skin so well. He seemed to be glowing, with that same tousled hair and five o'clock shadow. But there was something else, something in the smile. He looked happier, happier than Steve remembered him being for most of high school. Not to mention Tony was wearing a suit that fit him perfectly, complete with two undone buttons and a loosened tie that made Steve want to just reach into the photo and grab the tie and pull him closer.

Steve clenched his fingers around the plastic mouse. 

Tony looked perfect in a way that tugged on Steve's heart, of all places.

And then his phone buzzed.

(11:12)  
Dinner tomorrow then?

"Steve!" Maria said, hurrying over to his desk. Her heels clicked on the hard office floor like a chipmunk version of the Jaws theme song. "We need you in the conference room to look at some portfolios. And have you signed those contracts yet? I know I told Natasha you had until five but if we get them done now we can send them out on the courier service and have them delivered today. Bring them with you, and don't forget a notepad."

Steve grabbed the contracts, a pen, and a notepad. In his haste, he left his phone on the desk.

By the time he made it back to his desk, caught up in meetings, conferences, and an impromptu working lunch with a freelance writer that Maria and the writing staff were practically begging to contribute to next month's issue, it was almost four—five hours later. Steve had never seen his phone like this, practically bursting with unread text messages. The sight made him feel ill and happy at the same time in a way he was sure wasn't healthy. They were all messages from Tony. 

(11:30)  
Is that a no to dinner then too?

(11:37)  
Too busy?

(11:49)  
…Too forward?

(12:00)  
Would you believe me if I said it was just a lunch between old friends?

(12:03)  
Yeah, I wouldn’t believe it either.

(12:43)  
Maybe lunch another day?

(1:01)  
Coffee?

(1:32)  
Actually turns out diner wouldn’t be any good for me tonight anyway. Just informed I have to be in L.A tonight for some benefit thing because I’m so rich and popular.

(1:54)  
It's a benefit for an animal shelter. You should text me back and tell me how charitable I am. Because I am. 

(2:12)  
Or, you know, text me back at all.

(2:33)  
Yeah, texting me back would be awesome.

Steve picked his phone up, holding it gently, staring at it with his mouth slightly open. Was this what it looked like when someone was throwing themselves at you? He had half a mind to ask Natasha; she would know. 

"You alright?" It was Bruce, holding two Starbucks cups.

Steve grabbed at the coffee with his free hand, and took a big drink before saying, "Better now. Did Natasha ask you to ask me that?"

"No? Should she have? Are you okay? Did your tablet freeze again?"

Steve sat on the edge of the desk, Bruce standing in front of him, with his coffee in his left hand and his phone in his right. In between drinking the coffee, Steve explained what had happened, and how he ended up with so many texts from Forbes' most eligible billionaire bachelor. Bruce was silent for the most part, nodding occasionally, and ignoring his own coffee.

Finally, Steve finished. When Bruce didn't say anything, Steve asked, "So what would you do?"

"If Tony Stark was texting me?"

Steve nodded.

"He's not really my type, Steve."

"Come on," Steve nearly whined, putting his empty coffee cup down so he had a free hand to shove Bruce lightly on the shoulder with. "You're not helping."

Bruce narrowed his gaze on Steve. "You know how long it took me to ask Natasha out for drinks and you want my help?" Steve was about to say something else, and Bruce raised hand to stop him. "No, really, listen to me. I'm not good at this. But I know what you've told me about Tony. And if even half of what you've told me is true, he's basically the biggest asshole alive right now. I'm not a doctor, but it couldn’t possibly be healthy for you to see him. Or even keep texting him."

Steve nodded again. He didn’t say anything, though. He knew Bruce well enough now to know that there was an unspoken but at the end of the last sentence.

"If I know you, you've probably already texted him at least once." Steve looked away sheepishly, causing Bruce to scrub his hands through his perpetually messy hair. "You either need to not talk to him ever again, or," Bruce paused with a face like the words he was about to say tasted sour in his mouth, "go see him to get it out of your system. I don't want you to," he added hastily, "but you're an adult, Steve. And so is Tony Stark, at least legally speaking."

"Thanks, Bruce."

Bruce tried to smile, and in the end settled for taking a sip from his long-ignored coffee. "If he hurts you, I am actually going to punch him."

It was so sudden that Steve had to laugh at it. "I bet Maria would love to publish that story."

But in the middle of the joke Bruce was already walking away, saying something about work, leaving Steve alone. He looked down at his phone, pursed his lips, and began typing a message.

(4:17)  
If I agree to dinner tomorrow, with you stop sending me so many text messages? I need to get back to work. 

The response was almost instant.

(4:18)  
Yes! On way to board meeting now. Will text details tomorrow afternoon.

Steve typed out a quick message in reply saying that was alright, and then turned off his phone.

He spent the rest of the day erroneously sure that he would be seeing Tony tomorrow evening.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! So I promised a new chapter by the end of the week, and here we are. You might also notice that this section no longer has 3 chapters, but 12. Not only will there be 12 chapters in this section, but there will also be a third section to come after this. 
> 
> I have really enjoyed all your comments and appreciated your kudos, and I hope I can keep y'all interested as this story progresses. It's gotten a lot longer than I have anticipated, but I'm excited for the journey (most of which I have already planned out). 
> 
> Keep commenting, and if you'd like to bother me about updating via tumblr, my url is impossiblemonsieur.

That next day, Friday, Steve spent the entire day feeling like he was a child again on Christmas Eve, back when Christmas Eve was horribly long and its end couldn’t come fast enough. Some moments, Steve could swear he smelled peppermint, just faintly. Each minor task, each question from an intern, and each time he checked the clock and saw that not as much time had past as he thought felt like he was slowly being strangled by tinsel. 

Tony had said he would be there to pick Steve up around 7 in the evening. It was barely past noon, and Steve was already going crazy.

Last night, Steve had flipped through the trashy entertainment channels and found the one doing the best coverage of the charity event Tony was at in L.A. It turned out that Stark Industries had actually sponsored the gala to help support biodiversity in the world’s rain forests, but even then it had taken about fifteen minutes of scathing banter about almost every celebrity Steve could name before the cameras and the presenters had finally panned over to Tony. 

The tittering women had nothing bad to say about him, of course. Just comments about how well his suit fit and how they would love to take it off him. Steve couldn’t argue with them. Tony wore a suit like it was nothing at all, like he had been doing it all his life. Which, really, he had. 

Steve had watched the entire speech Tony had made, all forty five seconds of it, without even blinking. Tony looked directly into the camera the entire time, never hesitating once except for comic effect, and clearly knew what he wanted to say. The grin he had given the cameras along with a near-ironic peace sign felt like he had been looking right at Steve. 

There was a small part of his mind that had reminded Steve that yeah, he was looking at you and about a million other people that night--that was his thing. But as Steve had scrolled through picture after picture of Tony later that night--Tony with sports celebrities, Tony with movie stars, Tony with a scientist who studied some sort of stick bug--his heart had invaded the rest of his mind. 

This man, this sober father who cared about nature and had actually bothered to thank him for something, there was no way this was the fifteen year old who had cheered on the bullies who shoved Steve into lockers, who found every opportunity to tear down Steve’s then-fragile self esteem. This was a man that Steve could see himself falling in love with, as if some small part of him wasn’t already. 

And maybe that was why, when he was getting his second cup of coffee for the day, Steve texted Tony. 

(12:42)  
Saw you on tv last night. Very charitable.

Short, but he hoped Tony wouldn’t need much more to go off. Shutting Tony up had always been the challenge. 

But by the time Steve had made his second morning coffee, Tony hadn’t replied. That was fine, Steve reasoned with himself. Tony was probably flying back from L.A, and that flight was at least five hours. Either way, Steve put his phone in his pocket so that, if it vibrated, he wouldn’t miss the text. 

Nearly four hours later, when Steve was leaving work, Tony still hadn’t texted him back. Which was fine, still fine. Tony was busy and had things to do, he couldn’t respond to every text. 

It wasn’t until it was just past six in the evening that Steve considered the fact that, maybe, things were not fine. 

“Steve,” Bruce said, standing in the doorway of Steve’s room. “If you keep pacing like that you’re going to put a hole in the floor. I don’t know about you, but I’d kinda like my security deposit back.”

Steve looked down at the floor of his room. There wasn’t of it; most of the space in his small room was taken up by the queen-sized bed. There was a thin U-shape of hardwood floor around it, leading from the front door on one side of the bed to the bedside table on the other. Most days, Steve kept his room clean with minimal clutter, the way his grandma had raised him.

Tonight, he had pulled out every nice pair of pants and halfway decent collared shirt he had owned. Most were still on the bed, but some had fallen on the floor, scattered between ties and socks and the off pair of underwear. It looked as though his closet had thrown up all over his room. 

“Sorry,” Steve said, reaching down to pull up a handful of clothes and put them on the bed before sitting next to them. “I just don’t know what to wear.” Steve wasn’t sure if it sounded as ridiculous to Bruce as it did to himself when he said it out loud. He rubbed his face. “I think I might be turning into a sixteen-year-old girl.”

Bruce had that look on his face that Steve knew well. It was the way Bruce looked when he knew what he wanted to say, but not how to say it, like he was buffering. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Bruce said, standing up off the door frame before deciding to lean back on it. “But you’re, like,” he paused to move his hands around, as if he was fumbling an invisible soccer ball, “some sort of Greek god. You’ll look fine as long as you don’t wear that ridiculous American flag tie.”

“Hey,” Steve replied, “I like that tie. And you got it for me.”

“Yeah, Steve, as a gag gift. For your birthday. Because your birthday is the Fourth of July. It’s a gag gift,” Bruce repeated, slowly, as if he thought Steve didn’t know what a gag gift was. 

“Well, I like it.”

“It lights up and sings, Steve.”

Steve sighed. He had a brief, vivid image of leaning in to kiss Tony. The tie would get caught between them, light up, and start screeching out it’s nasally rendition of the national anthem. Even the embarrassment from the idea was enough to make him cringe. “Fine, I see your point. No American flag tie.”

As if he was making sure, Bruce went into Steve’s room and picked up the American flag tie from where it was on the bed next to Steve. He hung it back up in Steve’s closet, as if the farther away it was from Steve the less likely he was to wear it. “Why don’t you just call Tony and ask him what to wear, if you really insist on going through with this? Did he even tell you where you guys are going?”

And that was when Steve explained, fidgeting with another tie, that Tony hadn’t replied to his text or texted him at all today. Tony had only told Steve a time and nothing else. 

“Steve,” was all Bruce said when he had finished, and Steve knew exactly what he meant. “What time was he supposed to pick you up?” 

Steve told him. 

“That’s in about fifteen minutes. And did he even ask where you live?”

The question felt like a frozen punch to the stomach. Steve had been so caught up in the idea of dinner with Tony that he hadn’t even thought of that. After all, Tony hadn’t asked for Steve’s number, but he didn’t want to tell Bruce that. 

When Steve didn’t say anything, Bruce went on to say, “Look, why don’t you finish getting ready?” Bruce moved to leave, and when Steve asked where he was going, he said, “I’m going to go pour us some drinks.”

So Steve got ready. There was no point arguing with Bruce when he was like this, so sure he was right, like Steve was a comma splice in an otherwise pristine paragraph. Steve made sure his phone was on as loud as it would go when he put on a blue dress shirt and black slacks, brushed his teeth again, washed his face, and put a little product in his hair. The only thing he was really sure about was the shirt, which the shop clerk had insisted brought out the color of his eyes. Surely that made it good enough for a night out with Tony Stark, even if it did come from the local mall. 

When he was dressed and ready, Steve went into the kitchen where Bruce was sitting. The kitchen was as small as the rest of the house, with limited linoleum counter space, a refrigerator older than both of them, and a beaten up table with two chairs that he and Bruce had liberated from someone else’s trash pile a few years ago. Bruce sat at that same table with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses set out in front of him. 

“Whiskey, really?” Bruce rarely ever drank anything other than beer. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Steve said. 

“It’s five past seven,” Bruce said. He poured himself a little whiskey, barely a full shot, and drank it down in one go. He put the glass down and gestured to the other chair of their small kitchen table. 

Steve sat but didn’t touch the whiskey. Instead, he pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and put it on the table. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. Tony was…” but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to get started going on about how he knew Tony was bad at arriving on time because of their shared history. “Maybe he hit some traffic.”

“On a Friday night?”

“Maybe there was an accident.”

“Sometimes I would kill for a little bit of your optimism,” Bruce said. He poured himself and Steve a drink. 

Soon it was ten past seven. Then twenty past. Only when it was six minutes till eight did Steve finally take his first shot of whiskey. His phone had remained traitorously silent. 

By nine, the two were properly drunk. It was clear Tony Stark was not showing up this evening. 

“Man,” Bruce said, doing another shot, “I fucking hate that guy.”

Steve winced. Bruce, like Steve, only cursed when he was well and truly drunk. But Bruce, unlike Steve, only knew Tony from what Steve had told him. Steve only told the bad to Bruce, to Peggy, like if he told enough people the bad things he could give them all away and not live with them anymore. The good, Steve thought, aware of the way his thoughts swum in his head like tadpoles through jelly, wasn’t for anyone else. 

“I wish I could hate him,” Steve said, doing another shot. He hardly felt the way it scorched down his throat. “I mean, I do hate him. But not really. Sort of. Man, if Peggy was here she’d kick my ass for this.”

“Bruce snorted. “I’d kick your ass for it if I thought I could. You can’t just do this.”

“Peggy would kick my ass,” Steve repeated. 

The night ended with Bruce falling asleep on the couch and Steve leaving a long, rambling voice message on Peggy’s cell. It was almost three in the morning in London when Steve called, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t even sure if what he was saying made sense, but even as slurred as his words were, he knew Peggy would understand Tony’s name. 

Steve woke up the next morning on top of his bed, still fully dressed and cuddling a pile of button downs, with a splitting headache and taste in his mouth like something had crawled in there and died. 

He groaned loudly, and a voice from the living room called, “You sound like I feel.” Steve laid on his bed, arm over his eyes, until a finger poked him in the shoulder. “Water and meds. Please don’t die.”

Steve squinted against the morning light. Bruce had dark circles under his eyes and a too-pale complexion, like he had made too many trips from the couch to the toilet and back again. He had on boxers and a plain white t shirt, and his hair looked like he had been groomed by an overenthusiastic lion. 

It took all of the rest of the weekend for their hangovers to go away. Steve and Bruce spent most of the weekend splayed over the couch, drinking mass quantities of water (Steve) and hot ginger tea (Bruce) and watching whatever movies happened to be on the Sci Fi channel. By the time they felt ready for real food again and ordered Chinese, they had seen what seemed like every possible way to turn an average reptile into a murderous nightmare. 

“Snakes,” Bruce moaned, as he picked the peas out of his fried rice, “Snakes that hunt in packs. Those snakes are the worst.”

Steve made a small noise and then put an entire crab rangoon in his mouth. He chewed, contemplatively, before swallowing and countering with, “Nah, they’re not as bad as those giant alligators.”

It was a debate that persisted until Monday. 

“Steve,” Natasha said by way of greeting as she came over to his desk with suspiciously delicious smelling paper bag. Work had been more demanding than usual for a Monday in August, and it had helped keep Steve’s mind off his recent screw up. He had decided to work through lunch, not trusting his mind with that much free time. But working through lunch meant having vending machine chips and a soda for lunch. 

“Which would you least want to be mauled to death by,” Steve asked, making sure the work on the layout for the September cover was saved, “genetically modified snakes or a giant alligator?”  
Natasha took the chair by Steve’s desk, the spare one he kept for visitors and interviewing interns, and placed the paper bag down on his desk. This close, Steve could smell a cheeseburger and onion rings. “You and Bruce need to find better things to watch. But snakes are clearly the worse choice.”

“Thank you!”

Natasha narrowed her gaze, and Steve’s stomach felt a flashback of the Saturday morning hangover. “But that’s not why I’m here. I brought you lunch from that burger place down the block that you like.”

Steve licked his lips, and was beyond caring that Natasha probably asked Bruce about what his favorite work lunch was. The proximity of red meat, fried onions, and the fact that this meant Bruce was now talking to Natasha regularly (or at least more often than he was) more than made up for it. But he knew his coworker better than to think she just brought him lunch to be nice. “What’s the catch?”

Slowly, deliberately, Natasha took the burger with its paper wrapper already soaked with grease, and placed it on a napkin on a clean part of Steve’s desk. “No catch,” she said, then taking the onion rings out as well. “You eat. I talk. You listen.”

It still felt like a catch, like a trap. But Steve had the wrapper off the burger before he even knew what he was doing, and through the first giant bite mumbled, “Okay.” It tasted like heaven. Steve closed his eyes as he ate, marveling at the fact that Natasha had even known to get him extra pickles. 

When he opened his eyes, he saw that Natasha had straightened up and tucked her red hair behind her ears. She looked like she was about to fire an intern. “I won’t waste your time,” Natasha began. “This thing with Stark is unhealthy. Bruce is worried about you, and I’m worried it might affect your work.” She held up a hand when Steve tried to speak through a mouthful of onion rings. “It hasn’t yet,” she conceded. “But it might.”

There was a short pause, and only when Steve nodded did she continue. 

“That’s why I’ve decided to do something about it. I have a friend I want you to meet. He’s a photographer, and he’s back in town after doing a four month photography tour of Eastern Europe for his new photography book.”

Steve swallowed the bite he was working on; the burger was already half gone. “You’re wasted in art, ‘Tasha. They could really use you over in sales, you know.”

“Steve. Listen. I want you to meet my friend. I think the two of you could get along.”

The way she said get along had so many hidden implications that Steve wasn’t even sure she was allowed to say it at work. Either way, Steve had all his excuses ready. It was too soon, he wasn’t ready, trust issues, whatever it took to get Natasha to drop this idea. 

“Natasha,” Steve mimicked. He ate another onion ring before continuing. “I’m sure your friend is great. He’d have to be for you to be friends with him. But if Bruce has told you anything, you should know that it’s not exactly easy for me to just,” Steve stopped talking, looking for another onion ring, but the paper carton was empty. “I can’t just go put myself out there.”

As Steve finished the burger, Natasha seemed to be considering, like Steve was a console of buttons and she was looking for the right one. “I didn’t want to have to resort to this,” Natasha said finally. “Really, I think it’s a cheap shot, but you’ve left me with no choice.” She made direct eye contact with Steve, and held it as she delivered her ultimatum in a hushed but even tone. “This Friday night, Bruce and I will be having a lot of loud sex in your apartment. You can either be out moping at some coffee shop, or you can be at a bar having my very attractive friend buy you drinks with the advance on his next book.”

And that was it. The apartment walls were so thin that Steve had to watch porn with headphones in, even if his door was closed. And as much as he liked both his roommate and his coworker, Steve wasn’t about to be anywhere near that apartment Friday night. 

“Fine,” Steve said. “Fine.”

Natasha beamed. She pulled out her phone and held up a photo for Steve. He was no Tony, but Natasha’s friend was still very much Steve’s type. 

“So what’s his name?” Steve asked. 

“James,” Natasha replied, her smile simmering down into a smirk. “James Barnes.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear this is still a Stony story. But as I was planning, I wanted to go for realism, and as many of you have noted in the comments, Tony is being kind of awful right now. Does it help if I say that I've already half written their wedding?
> 
> Also, I am toying with the idea of adding a fourth part after this is all done, short chapters spanning all three of these parts, but from Tony's point of view. What do y'all think?

Steve and Bruce stood in front of the laptop, far enough away so that they were both in the camera, and waited. They had brought Steve’s laptop out in the living room, neutral ground, for the Skype call. It was early in the evening, before Bruce expected Natasha to arrive and before Steve needed to evacuate to avoid the oncoming sex hurricane. 

Or at least, he sincerely hoped it would be like that. Bruce didn’t get laid as often as he deserved. 

The two women on the other end of the Skype call made _hmm_ noises, like they were inspecting troops going out to war and not men going out on dates. 

“Should Bruce even bother wearing anything at all?” Angie asked, pursing her mouth together in thought. “I mean, it’s just sex right?”

“ _Angie_ ,” Bruce said at the same time as Peggy. Bruce looked down at his shoes while Peggy gave Angie an affectionate shove on the shoulder. 

“We’re having dinner first,” Bruce mumbled, and then repeated it louder so that the laptop speakers could pick up what he said and deliver the message thirty five hundred miles across the Atlantic to London. “And she’s the one talking about sex, not me.”

Steve looked over at Bruce, and then at the laptop. “Peg, she’s been trying to sleep with him since she got hired four years ago.”

They talked and laughed some more. It was five hours later in London, and Peggy and Angie had decided to stay up drinking wine while they waited for the call. Steve thought, as he always did when he got to Skype Peggy, that she looked the happiest that Steve had ever seen her. It probably had something to do with the diamond ring on her left hand, the one that kept catching the light and slightly distorting the video. Or maybe it was just the blonde woman, half-sitting in Peggy’s lap. 

Bruce, despite his attempts at smiling, was nowhere near that level. He had been cleaning the apartment since they had gotten home from work, so that the living room smelled like lemon furniture polish and the bathroom stank of bleach. “You’re having someone over, not covering up a murder scene,” Steve had said, when Bruce wouldn’t stop scrubbing the toilet. Steve had had to pry the scrub brush out of Bruce’s hand and half force him into the shower so that he would be ready for the Skype call. 

“I don’t think either of you should be wearing ties,” Peggy said. “Too formal.”

Angie agreed. Steve took his off, but Bruce didn’t. She then asked if Steve wouldn’t want to wear a blue shirt, to bring out his eyes, and Steve said no. He had that shirt from last week crumpled in a ball in the back of his closet, next to his American flag tie and a pair of beaten-up running shoes he still hadn’t gotten around to throwing away yet. Today’s shirt was red. 

Bruce left soon after, going to check on the apartment as if it might have magically disappeared or gotten dirtier during the call. When he left, Peggy said, “And don’t forget to mail me that painting, Steve. I have been asking you since July and you know how long it will take to get here.”

Steve said he would, he would. Peggy had been bothering to send her a watercolor painting he did a few years ago. It was a more abstract painting of Peggy in her prom dress, her arms out and her dress spinning--one of his better pieces. He had no idea why she wanted it, but he wasn’t going to not send it to her. 

“And don’t forget,” Angie added, leaning forward so all he could see was the middle part of her face, “that you’re coming to visit for Christmas. I haven’t met you in person yet and Peggy has been making lists for weeks of things we need to show you here in London. I told her we should just get you drunk at gay bars, but she insists on culture.”

Peggy pulled Angie back, away from the camera, and kissed her on the mouth. “I just want to make your flight over here worth it.”

“It will be worth it just to see you.” He hadn’t seen Peggy since she had flown back for his college graduation almost six years ago. Skype calls and the like helped, but now that Peggy was engaged he knew he had to fly over. “And as long as my plane doesn’t crash or anything, I’m sure the trip will be a success.”

After that Steve said goodbye, and the two women wished him good luck on his date and to tell Bruce the same. “I just want you to be happy,” Peggy said, looking over at Angie before back at the laptop camera. “And I know someday, you will be.”

Steve didn’t know what to say to that. He was, he felt, happy. Mostly happy. Happy on most days. It wasn’t as though he came home to an empty apartment. He and Bruce got along well enough, liked the same shows and the same takeout places, too. And he had a good job with decent co workers. He was happy. Just not in the same way that Peggy was. 

But then again, not everyone goes for a late night dinner only to have their waitress be their soulmate. 

So Steve said goodbye to Peggy and Angie, and passed their luck on to Bruce. Bruce waved Steve away with a shaky hand as he paced the floor, wringing his hands in an almost cartoonish manor. Natasha would be there any minute. 

In fact, Natasha was just down the hallway. She nodded at Steve. 

“Going out to go meet my friend?” Natasha asked, again with a voice that made it sound like a double entendre. 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “And be gentle with Bruce, okay? He’s about five seconds away from a heart attack.”

Natasha promised she would take good care of Bruce in a tone that didn’t make Steve worry about Bruce any less. Steve left before he could hear anymore of what she had to say, but halfway to the bar he was kicking himself for leaving so early. He should have at least asked Natasha when he would be able to come back home and not walk in on something he really did not want to see. 

The question bothered Steve, and he hung outside the bar when he finally got there, more nervous than he thought he would be. What would he do if this guy was awful? Find an all-night diner, order coffee and sketch on napkins until they kicked him out?

Steve rolled his shirt sleeves up. Even this late in August the heat was heavy, like an unnecessary electric blanket he just couldn’t shake. But at least the bar looked decent. It was a quiet place, a little away from the normal haunts of the younger crowds. And so Steve steeled himself, walked past the bouncer who didn’t even ask for his ID, and started to look for someone who looked for the guy Natasha showed him a picture of earlier that week. 

The bar on the inside was exactly what the outside promised. Somber lighting, a few televisions silently showing sports highlights. There was a pool table, a small and empty stage, and barely-visible sign pointing to the bathrooms. The ambient folk music was low enough that Steve could hear himself think, and there didn’t seem to be anyone here under twenty five. 

Even if the date went poorly, Steve thought, at least the bar wasn’t terrible. Then again, he couldn’t imagine Natasha sending him to one of those techno neon dollar shots of Fireball places that always seemed to popular with college kids.

He had been so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t even notice the man next to him until he tapped Steve on the shoulder. “Hey, this is going to sound weird if you’re not, but is your name Steve?” 

The picture Natasha had shown Steve had been from the shoulders up, and James had looked decent in the picture. But this man standing in front of him now was, well, very nearly had to believe. He was just about as tall as Steve and only slightly less muscular, with longish brown hair tied up haphazardly at the base of his neck. He had on jeans and a plain black long sleeve t shirt, with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of whiskey. His eyes were the most intense Steve had ever seen. 

“Please tell me you’re James,” Steve blurted out.

The man laughed, and for a heartbreaking second Steve thought he was wrong. “Jesus I am going to have words with ‘Tash. I told her not to call me that. James Barnes,” the man said, nodding his glass towards Steve as a way of greeting. “But please, everyone but my mother calls me Bucky. Now c’mon,” Bucky said, “let’s get a drink in you before you realize you’re too good looking to be here with me.”

Bucky had herded Steve to the bar and got him ordering a drink before the name really hit Steve. “Wait,” Steve said, taking a sip of the beer he had ordered. “Bucky? I didn’t know that was a real name.” Steve explained as quickly as he could that his childhood dog had been named Bucky, and he’d never met anyone else with that name. 

“I have to ask,” Bucky said, tipping his head back as his finished off the last of the whiskey in glass before ordering another one. “Did your dog have all his legs?” Steve said yes, and Bucky chuckled. “Aw, good for him. It’d be too weird if he didn’t.”

Steve asked why, and then immediately regretted it. 

Bucky took his left hand out of his pocket and showed Steve. Just past the hem of the shirt, where skin should be, where there was skin on Bucky’s left arm, there was nothing but metal. Intricate, moving metal, but metal nonetheless. “Army,” Bucky offered as a way of explanation. “I was too poor to pay for anything really, so I signed up for an experimental program.” He twirled his fingers, made a fist, and then unclenched it. “Bad ass,” he commented, “but it doesn’t feel. Still, better than nothing.”

Steve took two long sips of his beer, and didn’t know what else to say. 

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” Bucky said, quickly putting his arm back down and out of sight. “I always forget how it bums people out. But you know what the perfect cure for that is? Shots.”

“I feel like I should say,” Steve said, slowly, fingers drawing nonsensical patterns in the condensation of his glass, “that I can’t, uh, really go home until a lot later.” He had thought that maybe he and Bucky could sit at the bar with a few beers, talk, kill time until Steve was able to get back home. 

Bucky laughed, deep and hearty, and the way his stubbled jaw moved did things to the pit of Steve’s stomach. “All the more reason to get shots, then.” Bucky leaned in closer to Steve, like he was testing the waters. “And my place is close by, in case you need to sleep it off after.”

This close, Steve could smell Bucky’s aftershave, soft and leathery. He could see the flecks of green in his blue eyes and the dramatic cupid bow of his lips. This close, it was easy, so easy, for Steve to reach out a hand and gently touch Bucky on the small of his back, just a little too low to be simply friendly, before pulling his hand away. 

Just because Steve didn’t do this _often_ didn’t mean that he didn’t know how to do it all. 

“Well then,” Steve said, “shots it is.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A flashback chapter.

**Fifteen years ago**

Often when Tony would come through Steve’s window, he would throw his backpack through first, then jump in after it like he was abandoning a sinking ship. Sometimes, when it was cold enough, he would sneak over to the window and draw smiley faces and geometric patterns in the frost before Steve noticed him. When it was warmer, Tony would lean through the window just enough to pull Steve back outside, where they would lay under the cherry blossom tree in the backyard. 

Those were the times that Steve liked the best. 

But sometimes, sometimes it was like this. Sometimes Tony would knock twice on the window, softly, like it took much effort to keep his small hand in a fist to knock any longer. Those times, when Steve would open the window slowly, silently, he would step back and let Tony swing one leg over the window sill, and then the other, before sinking down and sitting at the base of the window. 

This was one of those times. 

Steve had known from the knock that had stopped him from studying for his seventh grade science test over basic geology. It was Saturday and the test wasn’t until Tuesday, but Steve wanted to be prepared. 

With Tony in his room now, though, Steve closed his book. Tony sat under the window, arms around his legs like he was trying to shrink himself down into nothing, the way Steve would sit years from now when Tony’s bullying would become almost unbearable. 

But now Tony was twelve and sitting in Steve’s room, small and sad. 

Steve sat next to Tony, close but not touching, like they had been the day they met. He waited for Tony to say something, because while Steve was never good at knowing what to say, he was always good at waiting. 

“We just got back from the hospital,” Tony said finally. He didn’t look at Steve when he said it. 

Mrs. Stark had been sick for a while, Steve knew. And when Steve had asked his grandma about it, because she used to be a nurse, all she would say was that sometime people got sick and there was nothing you could do about it but try to make the most of the time left. 

Steve kept waiting, and then it was as if something inside Tony just broke. He threw himself at Steve, who caught Tony, of course he did, and put his thin arms around him. Tony sobbed, wheezing and wet, onto Steve’s shoulder. “And he doesn’t even care,” Tony whined, “he doesn’t even care that she’s--she’s,” Tony stopped, seemingly unable to get the words out. 

It didn’t matter, because Steve knew what Tony couldn’t say. And he waited longer, holding Tony as sobs shook his body. This was the only time Steve had ever seen Tony cry. Even when he had fallen off his bike and fractured his arm last summer, he had only cursed made a lot of faces, but he didn’t cry. And it made sense to Steve. Broken hearts hurt a lot more than broken arms. 

Before he knew what he was doing, Steve was stroking the short hairs at the base of Tony’s neck and intentionally breathing in and out slowly, loudly, the way his grandma had with him when he used to have nightmares about his parents’ car crash. It seemed to help Tony, who quieted down some. At least he could do something, even if he didn’t know what to say. 

“Tell me about your parents,” Tony said, pulling away from Steve. Tony leaned over the other way to lie on the floor, back to the wall. 

Steve lay down too, in front of Tony, so that their foreheads almost touched. It was darker in this space between the window and the bed, somehow more intimate than all the times he and Tony had lain on Steve’s bed playing video games or doing math homework. And because he couldn’t tell Tony no, he started talking. 

He told Tony about how his parents had met in the local library, when his mother couldn’t reach a book and his father had helped her. Something about it seemed to calm Tony, like if he heard enough about people who got along he could project it onto his own parents. And so Steve closed his eyes and decided to give Tony the best memory he had. 

“Sundays, though, those were the best. My dad would get up early and make French toast, and my mom would work on the crossword puzzle and drink coffee. Sometime she’d even let me have some, when dad wasn’t looking. We would eat and sometimes make up words for the ones mom didn’t know.”

It didn’t happen every Sunday, but Tony didn’t need to know that. And who knows, maybe if they had lived longer, they would have ended up like Tony’s parents. But Steve didn’t know for sure, and Tony didn’t need to know that at all. 

“They’re buried next to each other,” Steve said. He tried to smile at Tony, eyes still closed, and only then realized that he had been tearing up as well. Steve opened his eyes and felt two solitary tears fall from his face to the bedroom floor. 

And there was something in that moment, in that bubble of tears and emotions. Tony opened his eyes and looked up at Steve for just a moment before wriggling closer, farther down, so that he could press his face into Steve’s chest. And Steve held him like that, one arm around him at an an angle that was less awkward than it should be. 

They did nothing but breath together, living off the same oxygen molecules and letting their carbon dioxide mingle as it left their noses in synchronized puffs. Years later, when Steve thinks of love, he will think of this moment. 

“Your parents really got along,” Tony said suddenly, moving his face so that he wasn’t just talking into Steve’s t shirt. 

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “They really did.”

Tony hummed, like he was thinking about it. Steve could feel Tony fidgeting. “And we,” Tony said, pausing before continuing, “we really get along too. Don’t we?”

For over a decade after this Steve will replay and rethink everything about this moment. He’ll marvel at how dumb they could both be, as if a twelve and a thirteen year old could be any more perceptive than Tony and Steve. As if saying something different, breathing at a different time, blinking or not blinking, would have changed the outcome of this event. 

And what gets Steve every time is that he didn’t know that the outcome of what he said, of what Tony did, wasn’t as perfect as he would believe for the next four months it was. 

“Yeah, we do get along,” Steve replied. He pulled Tony closer, and felt Tony move with the touch. They lay on the acrylic cream carpet for at least half an hour, until both their tears had dried. 

It would have been so easy, Steve knew, to tilt his chin down and kiss the top of Tony’s head. He knew girls in the seventh grade who had already had their first kiss; they bragged about it enough at lunch. He wanted to, wanted to destroy that inch of space between his lips and the top of Tony’s head. 

But there was time, Steve told himself. There was time to do this again, to do this better. 

In the time it took Steve to realize his mistake, the damage was already done. In four months Tony’s mother would be dead and Tony would be gone.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again guys, I promise this is still a Stony fic. By the end of this section, Steve and Tony will be together (and then there will be part three.) Also, if you get worried as you read, there's no Stucky smut. If anyone wants those scenes I am more than amenable, but I thought I would post this chapter without them at first.

Three shots later, and Steve and Bucky have made their way to a booth in the corner of the bar, underneath a neon sign advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon. Steve has another beer in front of him and Bucky is still drinking whiskey like it was the night before Prohibition. 

“Europeans, man,” he had said earlier, when Steve had commented on how much Bucky was drinking. “They can put this shit away. I had to learn to keep up or I’d be out on my ass.” 

And of course Bucky had told Steve all about his tour around Europe, how he had used his military training to cross dangerous terrain and get pictures most people wouldn’t even consider. Steve, whose idea of living dangerously was sketching on his tablet and not saving every two minutes, had listened intently to everything Bucky said. 

In turn, tried to talk about himself. But with a desk job and a life that pretty much revolved around that desk job, it was hard to make himself sound even partially as interesting as Bucky. Bucky, who now had one arm casually draped along the top of the wooden booth, his fingertips skimming the top of Steve’s shoulder.Bucky, who even if Steve quickly decides he wants to go home with, even if Bruce and Natasha are done with their screaming orgasms. 

Bucky had taken out his phone and handed it to Steve already, showing him low resolution versions of pictures of mountains and fields whose names Steve wouldn’t even dare pronouncing. They were all so terribly, impressively beautiful. like nothing Steve had ever created himself. It was almost a depressing thought, these jagged and slightly grainy mountains. 

That was until Bucky dropped his arm down from the booth and on to Steve’s shoulders, pulling in him just a little closer. Their thighs pressed together under the sticky table, and Steve licked his lips. 

“I know you are only out until Natasha stops screwing your roommate senseless,” Bucky said, leaning into Steve so he can whisper the words into Steve’s ear like they’re some shared secret, “but you don’t know ‘Tash. She could be going at it all night with that guy.”

There was a choice here. It was, according to the red neon clock on the wall, well past midnight--a reasonable time for Steve to start making his way back to his apartment. He could get a cab, get back, and maybe even send off a few warning texts so he didn’t have to see any of them naked. He could fall asleep in his own bed, use his own toothbrush in the morning, and make himself pancakes with his own Bisquick. 

Or he could not. 

“I hope so,” Steve replied, turning to whisper back to Bucky, tilting his head so that they weren’t kissing yet, but they could be, should be. “Because I’d really like for you to take me home.”

And that was all it took. Bucky paid their tab as Steve protested, and he was going to insist paying for a cab when Bucky pointed out that his hotel was in walking distance. 

It was a strange walk. The streets couldn’t seem to decide if they were awake or not--some places were still lit up with lights and others looked out for good. Girls holding high heels held on boys with shirts unbuttoned in the heat of the New York night, all seemingly searching for a cab, a cigarette, or a discrete place to throw up. Steve felt too grown up for this walk, and yet young all the same with the way he and Bucky walked next to each other, not touching, leaving a hair’s breadth between their bodies like they were afraid of getting caught. 

The hotel was small but nice, all polished glass and hardwood, with one tired clerk at the desk who didn’t even look up from his phone as Steve and Bucky made their way, still not touching, to the elevator. 

“I’m only here until I can move into this apartment,” Bucky explained, not looking at Steve but at the silence he wanted to fill. “I’ll be here for a while, doing some local work. ‘Tash said she’d kill me if I stayed away too long.”

Steve nodded, not sure what else to say. He was fine with the silence, the awkward anticipation. 

The elevator dinged and he nearly jumped. Bucky laughed, sweet and smooth, and slipped his arm around Steve’s waist when he saw there was no one else in the hallways. “Gettin’ jumpy on me, blondie?” he asked, and Steve just nuzzled Bucky’s neck in response. 

“You got a room up here?” he asked, “Or are we just going to canoodle in the hallway?”

That had Bucky laughing again. He took his arm away from Steve’s waist and went to take the room key out of his pocket. “ _Canoodaling_? Where the hell did ‘Tash even find you? The fourties?”

Steve had both his arms around Bucky before Bucky even opened the door, holding him there with the strength he barely used and whispering into Bucky’s ear with a voice he used just as often. “Fine then. How about I hold you down and ride you until you forget what year it is?”

Bucky opened the door and Steve followed him, hardly letting go at all. “Anything you want, blondie,” Bucky responded, in a voice that made Steve think he seriously meant it. “Anything you want.”

 

Now the problem with these hook ups, these one night stands, is always the ensuing awkwardness the morning after, like the bedroom floor got covered in eggshells last night while they both slept. Steve knew it well, the tense and uncomfortable after-effects of sleeping with someone just because they were attractive, and not because they connected on any other level.   
It was what he had expected for this morning, too, when he woke up on Bucky’s hotel bed. Most of the blankets had been kicked off last night, and the thin white sheet barely covered them to their hips. Steve could see Bucky’s metal arm glinting in the early morning light sneaking past the curtains, still slightly slick from the lube. His hair was undone, falling around his face in sweat-soaked strands, and Steve could see all of the scars that he only felt the night before. 

He wasn’t even curious what Bucky had done in the army to get those; Steve was just glad they all looked old and healed. 

“I can feel you staring at me,” Bucky accused, and rolled over so that he was looking at Bucky. “What, regretting your choices last night?”

The second comment caught Steve off guard. The way Bucky said it made it sound like that had happened before. “Nah,” Steve replied, sitting up and smiling. “I was just thinking that you look like you could use a shower.”

Bucky sat up then as well, stretching his mismatched arms up over his head and making a face as the joints in his right arm popped. “I don’t doubt it. Someone,” Bucky said, drawing the word out and looking pointedly at Steve, “got me pretty dirty last night.”

Steve was about to reply when his phone suddenly started ringing. He apologized and crawled over, trying to find his pants, and had to swat Bucky’s hand away when Bucky tried to playfully spank him. The phone kept ringing and finally Steve found the corner of the hotel room where his pants had ended up, pulled out his cell phone and answered it. 

“Steve,” Bruce said, “where are you?”

He looked over at Bucky, who was sitting with his back on the headboard, hands behind his head, and with a smirk on his face. “I’m, uh, still out. You know, with that guy Natasha set me up with.”

“Well, you need to come home.”

“Are you okay?” Steve asked. “Did Natasha--”

“No, no, Natasha’s fine. She’s making breakfast. It’s...well you really have to be here in order to understand.”

Over on the bed, Bucky is spreading his legs and waggling his eyebrows in a clear invitation back to bed. 

“Okay,” Steve says, “okay, okay. Just try to hold things down until I get there.”

Bruce asks when Steve will get back. Steve looks over at Bucky, who has started stroking himself with his metal arm, and beckoning Steve over with his other one. Steve closed his eyes and told Bruce he would try to be there soon, but no promises, and hung up the phone. 

“So are you going back now?” Bucky asked, still touching himself. 

“I’m going to go take a shower,” Steve replied, walking naked towards the bathroom. There was a moment where Bucky stopped moving, where he looked disappointed, until Steve said, “well c’mon then. You need to shower too.”

Two hours later, when Steve and Bucky were finally dressed, Steve was struggling to leave. 

“Bruce wanted me home,” Steve said, in between Bucky pulling on his shirt, drawing him back in for quick kisses. 

Bucky stopped kissing Steve’s mouth to kiss down his neck, licking the spot he had bit a bruise into the night before. “He’s been fine for the last few hours. He’ll be fine for twenty more minutes.”

And so they stood just inside Bucky’s hotel room making out until Steve pulled away. “If you don’t let me go, I won’t give you my number.”

“You weren’t going to give me your number?” Bucky asked, mock-pouting with his kiss-bitten lips. “That’s just cruel.”

Steve gave Bucky his number, promised that they could meet up again, and finally made his way back home. The entire way back, Steve felt like he was on top of the world. Not just from the familiar aches and pains of sex, but from the way he and Bucky fit together so naturally both in and out of bed. Maybe, Steve thought, this could be something. This could be _someone_.

That was all Steve was thinking about until he opened up his apartment door. 

“What,” Steve said, eyes nearly falling out of his head, “is this?”

The living room of the apartment was entirely covered in bouquets of red roses. 

“We were sort of hoping that you could tell us,” Bruce said, coming into the living room from the kitchen. He had on a t shirt and a pair of boxers, and his hair was sticking up in more directions than usual. 

Steve went over to the nearest bouquet that was propped up in a mason glass of water. It seemed as though all the glasses they owned were being used to hold these roses. There were roses on the coffee table, the end tables, the floor, and even the couch. The smell and the colors were overwhelming. “Who even sent these?” He examined the bouquet. “There’s no card.”

“There was one card,” Natasha said. She came into the living room wearing one of Bruce’s button up shirts, half unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled up. Steve had no idea if she was wearing anything else, and immediately looked back up at her face. He didn’t want to know. 

She came over to Steve and handed him the card before going to stand next to Bruce. “All it says is, ‘Sorry,’” Steve read. “That doesn’t really help.”

Bruce reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “Steve,” he said. “Who do you know who would want to apologize to you?”

“And be able to afford twenty five bouquets of red roses? There’s more in the kitchen,” she added, clearly sensing that Steve was about to chime in that certainly there weren’t twenty five bouquets in this room. 

The words made Steve feel like someone had reached into his chest and ripped out his heart. Things with Bucky had been so _good_ and now it was if someone had taken a baseball bat to those newly-minted memories and smashed them to shards. “Why didn’t you just throw them out?” Steve asked, crushing the card in his hand. 

Natasha wrinkled her nose. “Because your apartment smelled like bleach and the Fabreeze wasn’t helping. Besides, clearly had fun last night. So why dwell on this?”

And that was Natasha, ever the pragmatist. She had a solution for when the copier stopped working, for when the wifi cut out, for when accidentally deleted important documents, and apparently for when Tony decided to try and trample all over Steve’s new life. 

He wondered if it could be that easy. If he really could just appreciate the way the roses smell and not focus on where they came from. “It seems sort of rude to keep these and not send him a reply.”

“No response _is_ a response,” Natasha said. “Besides, I want to hear all about your night with James.”

Bruce made them coffee and they sat in the kitchen as Steve told them (most) of how his night with Bucky went. Bruce was overenthusiastically pleased, and Natasha just seemed smug. And it was nice. Bruce seemed more relaxed, and Natasha kept looking at Bruce like she couldn’t believe he was still right there. 

That, that was what Steve wanted. 

“So are you going to see him again?” Bruce asked, because Bruce knew Steve well enough to know that it might not be a possibility. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, hardly hesitating. “I mean, I really want to.”

And the thing was, even in an apartment full of roses from Tony Stark, Steve really did want to see Bucky again.


	7. Chapter 7

It’s amazing how much can happen in two months. 

Steve sees Bucky again. They’re drawn together like magnets, like someone tied them together when they weren’t looking, so of course they have to see each other again. They go running and rock climbing and to art galleries and somehow in between it all manage to each have jobs and together have some of the best sex Steve has ever had. They don’t put a label on it, have been dancing around what this actually _is_ , but it’s comfortable enough that Steve doesn’t mind. 

The September issue of New York Monthly comes out, with Tony’s face plastered on the cover and taking up most of the middle as well, along with ads for different companies he owns all through the back pages. Steve tries to tell himself that it’s only due to Natasha’s photography skills that Maria decided to blow up the cover, frame it, and hang it in the lobby. But that doesn’t help the way it stings, the way Steve will now have to look at Tony every day he walks into the office. 

It’s something Steve wants to tell Bucky about. But explaining this would mean explaining everything, and this thing that he and Bucky had already felt so fragile half the time, like a beautiful stained glass window. 

It didn’t stop Steve from telling Bucky he had a bad day at work, leaving the details out. And Bucky just came over, didn’t ask for the details. Instead, he got down on his knees in front of Steve and sucked him off, slow and dirty, until Steve could hardly remember what had upset him in the first place. 

_Boyfriend_ was the word that buzzed around in his mouth as Bucky stood up, kissed Steve just as slow so he could taste himself on Bucky’s tongue. But the word never left his mouth. 

As soon as the September issue was out they started on the October one, and then the November one, until October was all but dead and Natasha was reminding everyone nearly constantly about her Halloween party that weekend. 

Natasha’s apartment was a little farther away, the longer commute equating to more space, but even so it was packed with people in all sorts of costumes that Saturday night. The brave (or foolish) ones had red solo cups filled with Natasha’s homemade punch. That punch was the reason he had missed half of the fireworks--Natasha had kept filling his cup with it, saying that he had to drink because it was his birthday, and so Steve drank and drank until he was hugging the toilet, the fireworks only a distant buzz in his ears. 

Steve, and everyone else it seems who was at Natasha’s Fourth of July were drinking bottles of beer. 

“You look good,” Natasha said, sipping her red solo cup. 

Steve gripped his beer bottle a little tighter, and looked down at what he was wearing: a cheap, mostly stretch-polyester Superman costume, complete with cape. His blond hair, he knew, didn’t quite go, but he had been Superman for nearly every Halloween as a kid, and it was a hard habit to break.

“Thanks,” he replied. “And so do you. Wow.”

He and Natasha were friends. He’d seen her in various stages of undress, like that time they all went to the beach or hell, even that morning a few months ago when she had first slept with Bruce and probably only had that shirt on. But this was different. Natasha had on what looked to be a skin-colored leotard with conveniently placed leaves, green fishnet tights, and some sort of flower crown. 

“You’re--”

“Poison Ivy,” Natasha said. “You know, Batman?” Natasha pursed her lips. “Please tell me you know who Batman is.”

Steve took a big gulp of beer, feeling the bottle lighten and empty in his hand. Yes, he knew who Batman was, he wanted to say. Tony was Batman every year for Halloween, always throwing his foam Batarangs at Steve, who would pretend to deflect them with his superhuman Superman strenght. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I know who Batman is. You look good. Where’s Bruce?”

She pointed over to a group of men huddled together and laughing near the kitchen. There was Bruce, seemingly normal except for a lab coat that looked to be two sizes too big for him. “They’re making grammar jokes, so I politely excused myself.” Natasha looked down at the cup in her hand. “I need about four more of these before I find grammar jokes funny. And hey, where’s James? I know I invited him.”

“He said something about putting the finishing touches on his costume,” Steve replied. He had no idea who or what Bucky was going as, but--

“Steve!” Suddenly Bucky was there, with an arm around Steve’s shoulders, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Hey ‘Tash,” Bucky added, before reaching out and grabbing Natasha’s cup. “Thanks for making me a drink.” He took a big drink of the punch like it was water. 

Natasha snatched her cup back. “And now I’m regretting inviting--” she paused mid-sentence, looking Bucky up and down. “No way.”

Bucky stepped away from Steve so Natasha could get a better look. Steve turned to look as well, not exactly sure what he was looking at, or why Bucky was wearing a clearly fake beard and a red and black jumpsuit. 

“What?” Steve asked, because Natasha and Bucky had begun twittering with words that didn’t even sound like English. 

Bucky’s blue eyes grew wide, and Natasha looked like she was physically straining not to laugh. “ _Steve_ ,” Bucky whined, “Steve! Please don’t tell me you’ve never seen Star Trek?”

“He’s Riker,” Natasha said, like that word would mean anything to Steve.

“That’s it,” Bucky declared, “no more sex until you’ve seen at least two seasons of Star Trek. Now c’mon, blondie, let’s get some more drinks.”

And maybe it’s because he’s finally found a part of Bucky’s life that he doesn't’ slot neatly into, or maybe it was because Steve sees not one but two Batmans on the way to the drinks table, but Steve let Bucky to pour him a generous cup of Natasha’s punch, and followed Bucky in Fireball shots. They tasted like he just gargled cinnamon, but soon the heat floated up to his brain and things felt fuzzier, easier. 

They talked and drank and talked some more, with the heat in Natasha’s apartment making October feel like August all over again. Towards midnight Steve mumbled something about air to Bucky, and pushes his way through the crowd to Natasha’s balcony. 

There was a couple of women making out in one of the darker corners who tittered and ran inside when they see Steve. He felt bad about making them leave, but that’s before he got a gulp of crisp, fall air in his drunk lungs. Without even thinking, he sat down on the concrete floor, put his head in his hand, and looked out at the blinking cityscape. It’s not the best view in town, but it’s still a view. 

“I thought I’d find you here,” a voice said from behind him. Bucky came over to Steve and sat beside him. “All good?”

Steve didn’t look at Bucky. “I needed some air,” he explained, “it’s just too hot in there. Too many Batmans,” he added before he could stop himself. 

Bucky chuckled, but it was nervous, like testing the ice on a lake in November. “Got some sort of Batman phobia I should know about?”

And this was the time, Steve knew. He had to tell Bucky now, when there was just enough alcohol in his system for this to not seem like such an awful idea. “Tony,” Steve said slowly, hating the way the name tastes like Fireball on his tongue, “was always Batman for Halloween.” 

“Tony,” Bucky repeated, and then put it together in a matter of seconds because, drunk or not, he was not an idiot. “Tony _Stark_. Are you some sort of Tony Stark stalker fan?” Bucky asks tentatively, like he just found the crack in the ice with his foot and can’t step back. 

“We grew up together. Same school and everything. My grandma would always take us trick or treating because his parents never had the time, and his mom was pretty sick. Did you know that?” 

Bucky hums. “I always knew there was something.”

That made Steve look over at Bucky. “What?”

“Something,”Bucky repeats. “You always seem a little...not here. Like most of you is here,” he explains, gesturing with his metal hand, “But your core is on another planet or something. And I’ve been trying so hard Steve, you know I have. But I can’t compete with Tony Stark.”

The words hurt worse than if Bucky had just sucker punched Steve with his metal arm. Because it wasn’t that Steve didn’t _want_ to love Bucky, this Bucky, with his stupid fake beard and ridiculous costume, the same Bucky who went running with him and was always there to comfort him. 

“Bucky,” Steve pleaded. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to love Bucky. He just couldn’t. 

And what was worse was that Bucky now knew it too. 

“Steve.” And it was final, the way Bucky said his name. Like it was an ending, a full stop. “I’ll always be here for you, but if you can’t say the same for me I don’t know what we’re gonna do.” Bucky stood and squeezed Steve’s shoulder with his hand before going back inside. 

Steve wanted to call after him. He could feel Bucky’s name in the back of his throat, trying to climb back up and into his mouth, but the feeling like he was about to cry, like if he even opened his mouth his heart would fall out and flop on the floor, stopped him. 

Deep down Steve knew that Bucky would have left whether or not Steve said his name or not. 

Steve only waited a few more minutes before going inside and finding Bruce, who knew exactly from the look on Steve’s face that Steve needed to go home and couldn’t get himself there. Thankfully, he didn’t see Bucky on the way out. 

 

That night, drunk and full of unfallen tears, Steve dreamed of Tony. It was a familiar, recurring dream. The sort of dream that comes from dwelling too much on a memory, making it bleed into the subconscious and infect the most dangerous dreams that only alcohol can bring to the surface. 

In the dream, Steve was backstage, fidgety and nervous. It was opening night and despite all of the rehearsals, Steve was still worried he would open his mouth and nothing would come out. Or worse, Something _awful_ would come out. 

But in the dream, like it had been twelve years ago, Steve didn’t have a choice. The orchestra was tuning up, getting ready, and soon the chorus would take the stage to start the show. 

And so, when the curtain rose, he and the dozen other chorus members moved to their places and began singing. And then once things got started, that was it, it was so easy. Steve knew the choreography and the words and the lines and everything about this show back to front and front to back.

There was a small pause where one of the mains had a small solo, and Steve decided to look out into the audience. It was hard to see anything with the way the stage was all lit up like that. 

Or so Steve thought. He looked up, hoping for a glimpse of Peggy or his grandma because they had promised to come for opening night. But instead he saw Tony. Tony, sitting off to one side of the auditorium, arms and legs crossed and an unreadable expression on his face. Tony, who earlier that day had laughed along with Clint and Thor about how anyone was so stupid to go see that gay-ass musical. 

Steve woke with a start, the image of teenage Tony fresh in his mind, leaned over his bed, and threw up an acid mouthful of Natasha’s punch.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! Hopefully the next few chapters will be a little be quicker.

Time, as it has always done, moved forward. 

November bled into early December. It took three weeks for Steve and Bucky to talk again, over tense coffee and stuttering words. They left full of caffeine and untested promises of friendship, but overall it was better than silence, and it helped fill in the sinking feeling Steve had had since the Halloween Party. 

And Steve would have dwelled on it too, maybe gone to try again, if he didn’t have a flight to London leaving four hours. 

“You’ve got all your work done, Rogers?” Maria asked, hovering over his desk, arms crossed, as if he hadn’t done anything all week. As if he hadn’t hoarded all of his paid time off for this one trip. 

“Contracts are signed, clients have been contacted, all important documents have been forwarded to Natasha, and we have one of the new art people doing a digitial art piece for December’s feature story.”

Maria nodded, clearly pleased despite the lack of a smile. “Very good, Rogers. Have fun,” she said, and then walked off. 

The sound of her heels echoed more than usual. Half of the office was empty from people already taking their days off or out sick because of the weather. The ankle-deep snow that coated most of upstate New York had destroyed some people’s immune systems. Bruce was currently back on the couch of their apartment, going through a box of tissues an hour and watching game show reruns with bleary eyes and a stuffed-up nose. 

“Oh,” Maria said, coming back to Steve’s desk, “make sure you check your box in the mail room. You have a package and if it’s from a potential client, I need you to look it over while you’re gone.” And then Maria left again, as if the request to have Steve do work over his one holiday of the year was a reasonable request. 

But Steve didn’t have time to dwell on it. He cleaned up his desk, throwing away old coffee cups and shoving pens into drawers, making sure his space was in a decent state to leave. Steve did remember to grab the package from his office mailbox on the way out of the door, stuffing it into his bag. 

He rushed through the next part of the day without blinking or hardly even taking a breath. Steve had to go back to his place, grab his bags, catch a cab, make it to the airport and then go through all of that. They changed his gate and so, after running to catch his plane, Steve felt like he went from saying goodbye to a sick Bruce to catching his breath in seat 18 C while being told to put his tray table and seat up. 

Steve didn’t even make it through take off before he was asleep in the seat, leaning against the plane window. 

He woke up somewhere over the Atlantic, with a crick in his neck and hunger pangs in his stomach. The cabin lights were off, and the man next to him was snoring quietly. Steve pushed himself up in his seat to see if there was anyone with a cart walking down the center aisle, but no luck. It seemed he had missed dinner. 

Silently cursing the man next to him for not waking him up, Steve pulled his backpack out from under the seat in front of him. He rummaged through it and found a bag of trail mix, and a half-drunk bottle of water he had paid way too much for past airport security. Not the best dinner, but better than nothing. 

It was only as he was zipping his backpack back up that he noticed the envelope, the one from work that he had been forced to take on his vacation. Steve knew, objectively, that he shouldn’t open it. He had still tired, and there was a large chance he would get crumbs all over whatever important documents this new client had sent. 

But he had nothing better to do, so Steve stowed his bag, unlocked his tray table, and reached up to press on the tiny light above his head. He sat his water and snack down on the plastic tray, and then opened the envelope. 

It was a nondescript brown envelope, with no return address. It only had Steve’s full name on the front in blocky handwriting, and underneath the address of the publishing company. Steve ate a handful of trail mix and couldn’t help but think that it didn’t look right--it didn’t look like the regular envelopes he was used to receiving. 

Steve knew he was right the moment he opened the envelope, but god he wished he wasn’t. There were no documents, no official files, only photographs. Some were Polaroids, with the dates scribbled down on the thick white border at the bottom of the picture. Others were standard photographs with the dates on the back, always in the same handwriting, always in the same corner.

The pictures didn’t have descriptions. They didn’t need them. 

One faded Polaroid showed Tony at the fourth grade science fair. He was standing on a box to see over the table, hair askew and a manic grin on his face. Steve didn’t remember the project, but he knew he had been there to support Tony, in his blue button down shirt and shy attempt at a smile, standing just behind Tony and off to the side. Steve hadn’t competed in the science fair, he hadn’t wanted to. He had just wanted to support Tony. 

There was a picture of the time they went to the water park, just after Tony had dumped his entire strawberry slush on Steve’s head. Steve had just said he didn’t want to go down the biggest waterslide in the park, and Tony hadn’t been too happy about that. Tony looked all too smug in his red swim trunks and holding the empty slush cup. Steve, his American flag trunks tied tightly around his hips because they were at least two sizes too big, looked like he was about to punch Tony. 

Each photograph brought back to life the memory it embodied in vivid, technicolor detail. 

One was of Steve at Tony’s 11th birthday, sitting down because he had twisted his ankle in the bounce house. Another showed Steve and Tony Steve and Tony right before Tony threw up from eating too many Twizzlers at Steve’s 12th birthday party on a dare. Then there was Steve and Tony giving puppy Bucky a bath in Tony’s backyard so Steve’s grandma wouldn’t find out that they tried to paint him blue. 

Steve flipped through them faster and faster, hardly looking at them anymore, hating the way they smiled in each photo. As the photos shifted, a small piece of white cardboard fell out of the stack: a business card. It was Tony Stark’s business card. 

Steve stared at the business card, a shocking white against the grey-yellow of the tray table. He picked it up slowly in his hand, as if afraid it might bite him. Steve turned it over just as slowly; he wasn’t expecting there to be writing on the back. 

_I was going through some old things and found these. They were my mother’s, but I thought you might want them. --Stark_

As the tears formed in the corners of his eyes, Steve crumpled the business card in his hand. He had no idea what hurt more: the fact that Tony had sent him photos his mother had taken, or that he had only signed the card with his last name.

Steve put the photos and the crumpled card back into his backpack, ate the rest of his trail mix, and the next time he woke up again he was in London.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so first of all I owe all y'all the biggest apology. I'm sorry I haven't been updating this fic as often as before. But! If you're still interested, there are actually two more parts in the work before this is finished. I've already started on the next part, and it's going to be from Tony's POV. And then, I swear in part four they will get together and it will be...well it will be something. I don't want to give too much away now, do I?

Peggy and Angie picked Steve up at the airport, chatted to him on the ride back to their apartment, and made sure he was comfortable in the guest room before they went to bed themselves. 

It was surreal, seeing Peggy in person again after all these years. And meeting Angie was just the way that Steve had always pictured it--she was a slightly-shrill ball of energy and looked at Peggy like she hung the moon. Their apartment smelled like incense and jasmine, and the guest bed had an inordinate amount of pillows. 

Steve spent hours trying to convince himself that it was the new smells, the new pillows, the new continent that was keeping him from falling asleep, instead of the old pictures at the bottom of his backpack. He tossed and turned and didn’t want to look at them, not again, not ever. Those were memories he thought he had buried the same way he had buried his dog. 

Eventually it was just too much. Steve got up, quietly padding from the guest room to the small kitchen. It was clean, cozy, with a faint light coming from just above the stove. The clock on the microwave and a little bit of math told him that it was just about six in the morning back in Buffalo--the normal time he would be getting up, but still the middle of the night in London. 

The kitchen felt airy, alien, and Steve could hear the gentle tap of rain on the window. Steve had expected snow in London, he had told Peggy on the way over. But she and Angie had just laughed, and told Steve they had an umbrella he could borrow. 

Steve went over the refrigerator, covered in cheesy tourist magnets that Peggy liked to gripe about Angie collecting. There were even a few from New York, ones that Steve had sent over as part of gifts over the years. Did knowing someone since high school give you the right to raid their fridge without asking, Steve thought, slowly opening the door as if he expected sirens to go off. 

“If you’re hungry, you should try the curry. It reheats pretty well,” a voice behind Steve said. Angie laughed when Steve jumped and turned around to face her. 

“Peggy was right. You do need to wear a bell.”

Angie just laughed again, quietly, like the rain on the glass. “All those years of ballet and tap will do that. I’m very light on my feet.”

Steve nodded. He knew Angie’s backstory, had heard it enough from Peggy: an aspiring actress who moved to London with her boyfriend who soon dumped her. She occasionally got cast in some smaller productions, ones which Peggy always attended, and worked part time jobs on the side. But it was still strange, seeing all of those details come together in a live person, one not only seen through Skype and digital photos. 

“Tea?” Angie asked, filling the kettle and taking out two mugs before Steve even said yes.

He took her up on her offer for the curry, and let Angie show him where the bowls and forks were. In a few minutes, he was eating a bowl of reheated curry at the small kitchen table, and waiting for his mug of tea to cool. 

“Jeez, don’t they feed you on those planes? I mean I know Peg said you can really put it away, but wow.”

“Missed dinner,” Steve said through a mouthful of food. The rain had picked up now, and he almost couldn’t hear the way his fork scraped the bottom of the bowl. 

Angie made a face. “Well that sucks. I’d let you eat Peg’s curry too, but it’s stupidly hot and would probably kill you. And then she’d kill me for killing you.”

They both laughed at that. There was just something so easy about talking with Angie, Steve thought, almost like he had known her as long as he had known Peggy. Together they talked and sipped their tea as the rain kept falling outside. And if Angie yawned, Steve didn’t see it. 

Later that day Peggy and Angie took Steve to see every London tourist attraction that he had ever heard of, and even more ones that he hadn’t. And at first it was fantastic. Between the food and the photos and waiting in line to things that were older than the entire neighborhood where he had grown up, Steve hardly had time to sleep. 

But as the days went on, what he had seen on the plane started cropping back up more and more in his mind. The perpetual question of what it meant was always tinged with anger, bitterness. That seemed to be all Tony was good for now that he was back in Steve’s life: coming up at inopportune moments and ruining Halloween parties and trips to London. 

And just when Steve would resolve to hate Tony Stark and burn the photos the moment they were back at the flat, he would see a couple holding hands and wonder what it would be like to hold Tony’s hand in the comparatively-warm London winter. 

“Hurry up, Stevie,” Angie called, waving her arm above her head. 

It didn’t take long for Steve to catch up with Angie and Peggy, who had already ducked into the pub. “So this is the place?” he asked Angie, following her to the table that Peggy had already claimed. 

“It is indeed,” Peggy replied, as Angie went to go get drinks. “That booth right over there, on the right. Do you see it?”

Steve’s eyes followed Angie’s fingers to a booth where two burly men were sitting, gesturing wildly over half-empty pints of beer. And maybe it was all the old movies he had watched growing up, but even though Angie had called it a pub Steve had always pictured her meeting Angie in some sort of fifties style diner, with bright vinyl seats and a jukebox or something. Not, well, not a pub decorated in bronze and hard wood that looked like the background in a period-piece bar brawl. 

“You worked here?” Steve asked Angie, because he just couldn’t picture it even as he saw her approach their booth holding three pints. 

Angie laughed and sat down. “Hey, a job’s a job. And I got to meet this one,” Angie added, before winking at Peggy and nudging her foot under the table. “So it wasn’t all that bad.”

They sat and laughed and chatte for a bit longer, before Steve could no longer resist asking, “but Angie, how did you know?”

“Know what?”

Steve took a long sip of his drink. “I don’t know, about Peggy. I mean, you must have seen dozens of people a night. Why Peggy?”

Peggy blushed, but turned to look at Angie all the same. “I’d like to hear this too, I think. Why did you slip me your number that night?”

Angie, to her credit, did not blush at all. If anything she straightened her posture, as if it too had to reflect how sure she was about what she was going to say. “It was her laugh,” Angie said, “and the way she wrapped her fingers around her water glass.” Angie smiled at Peggy. “I knew at that moment I’d do anything to be the person who got to make her laugh.” 

There was a pause, like the conversation was too intimate for the pub, even in their booth. Steve could hear the sounds of glasses being set down on hard wood, the creak of the front door, and the deep rumblings of foreign conversations. 

But just as Peggy was putting a hand on Angie’s arm, Angie added, “also I knew I wanted to be the person who had those hands--”

“Angie!” Peggy protested, before stifling anything else Angie had to say with swift tickles to Angie’s ribs. 

Steve finished off the rest of his beer. That was love, he supposed, and it was good someone had gotten it right in the end. 

 

It was the night before the night before Christmas, and the London sky had not stopped raining all day. But Angie was adamant that her Christmas surprise for Steve would go through regardless, and so while she was off working on that Steve and Angie stayed at the flat, watching crappy television and trying to guess what was in the presents already under the modest-sized Christmas tree. 

“This one’s a book,” Steve said, handing the present back to Angie. The game had started as simple guessing, but when Angie realized just how _good_ Steve was at it, she had him guessing at all the presents she had wrapped for Peggy to see if she could stump him.

“Well that’s too easy.” Angie handed Steve a rectangular box with reindeer wrapping paper--the edges of the paper were frayed and it had too much tape; clearly Angie had wrappped it. “What’s in this one?”

Steve took the box, weighed it in his hands, and then shook it twice before announcing, “clothes.”

“More specifically?”

“It’s a dress, Angie,” Steve said. 

Angie cursed. “You’re never wrong. It’s like some sort of freaky superpower.”

“Well, it’s just that--” but Steve stopped himself. Even if he had been thinking about Tony over the past few days, he hadn’t brought him up. And somehow bringing him up here, talking about he and Tony would spend hours guessing at all of Tony’s presents before Christmas (because he had so many more of them and all of Steve’s gifts were clothes and books anyway), felt like it would ruin something. Whether that something was the moment he was having with Angie, or the moment he had with Tony, Steve wasn’t sure. 

But then Peggy called and said they were ready and Steve let Angie lead him down to a cab. 

“Hey,” Steve asked, as Angie paid the cabby, “what are we doing at Peggy’s gallery?”

They had visited it a few days ago, after hours, and Peggy had given Steve the grand tour of where she worked, a small art gallery that worked to promote local and upcoming artists. The place had been half-dark and complete chaos a few days ago because, as Peggy had explained, the gallery was in-between collections. 

But Angie just dragged Steve inside and told him that Peggy would want to explain. 

The gallery looked nothing like it did before. Every light was on, and the place was packed with people. Steve could smell the tang of h'orderves and everyone seemed to have a can of beer or a glass of wine. The wooden dividers were now neatly arranged, and all the art framed, hung, and labeled. 

“So what do you think?” Peggy asked, coming up and grabbing onto Steve’s arm like she had so often in high school. Next to them, Angie waved and made a motion like she was going to talk to someone, and Peggy let her go. 

“I already told you I like your gallery, Peg,” Steve replied. But Peggy had a look on her face that clearly told Steve there was something he wasn’t getting. She looked maniacally smug. 

“Well I think you’ll like it a little more now that it’s all set up. Come on,” she said, before motioning over one of the serves with a tray of wine glasses and taking one for herself. 

Steve took a glass as well, not wanting to be impolite. And it was nice to have something to sip on as Peggy led him around and explained the art pieces to him, what she knew about the artists, and how hard certain pieces were to frame. “Don’t even get me started on _that_ ,” Peggy said, nodding toward a sculpture that looked like a fusion between a house-cat and a dragon. 

“I like it.”

“It sheds, and one of the wings has already fallen off. Twice.”

“Ah.”

“Well, let me show you a piece that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out.” She led Steve to another part of the exhibit, where a single framed painting in a gilded frame was all that hung on a white wall. “I’m really rather fond of this piece.”

Steve knew that piece. He knew that subject, he knew those watercolors. He knew every line and curve in that painting because they were all _his_. “Peggy,” he said, because it was all he could think to say. “You framed it.”

Peggy leaned in to Steve and nuzzled her head into his shoulder. “Of course I did! I’ve been meaning to steal it away from you and frame it for years. It’s your best watercolor, I think. It’s--it’s sold.”

She dropped Steve’s arm and approached the wall, where a yellow and orange sticky note, stuck up next to the plaque with Steve’s name and the name of the painting, clearly had the word ‘sold’ on it. “It’s not supposed to sell,” Peggy murmured, plucking the sticky note off the wall. 

Steve followed Peggy to the corner of the gallery toward the door, where a skinny man with a handlebar moustache and suspenders was scanning the crowd and flipping through his phone. Peggy slapped the note down on the counter. “This was near that watercolor in the back, number thirty-seven. I said you weren’t allowed to sell it.”

The young man quickly slipped his phone into his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he stuttered. “I know you said not to sell it but--”

“But what?” Peggy asked, in a tone that made even Steve want to run and hide, and he’d done nothing wrong. 

The man with the moustache took a deep breath. “The man on the phone asked what was the most we’d ever sold a painting for, and so I told him. And he offered to pay double that for the watercolor.”

“Who in the bloody hell--” Peggy began, as the man grabbed a slip of paper from a pile and handed it to her before backing away. Peggy scanned it once, then twice, and then uttered a single word. “No.”

“W-who bought it?” Steve asked, not even certain if he could.

She handed Steve the sheet, and it only took one look at it for a certain name to jump out at him. 

_Stark, T._

“Did you tell him?” Peggy asked. 

The man behind the counter, seemingly feeling safer, had pulled his phone back out again. 

“How could I?” Steve asked. “I didn’t know about it until five minutes ago.”

Peggy took a deep breath, shook her head slightly, and nodded. “Well then. Nothing we can do now. Let’s just go find Angie and enjoy the night, alright?” She placed a comforting hand on his arm, as if this incident had upset him. 

“Peg,” Steve asked, folding up the piece of paper and slipping it into his back pocket, “how much _is_ double of the most you’d ever sold a piece for?”

“Almost enough for me not to be mad at the bastard,” was Peggy’s only response. 

Luckily, it wasn’t enough to damper the evening. They stayed, drank, looked at the art, and when it was time to close up they ventured out into the London rain to drink some more. By the time the three of them stumbled back to the flat, Angie had a hand half-up Peggy’s blouse, and Peggy couldn’t stop laughing. 

Steve stumbled into the guest room, shutting the door behind him after yelling at Angie and Peggy to get a room. He started undressing, but only after he got his jeans off did he realize that there was a slip of paper in his back pocket. Oh right, the receipt from the art gallery. 

Wearing nothing but his boxers, Steve picked up the note and brought it over to his bed. He sat down. trying to ignore the fact that he could hear the headboard hit against the wall in the other room. The sheet had the lot number for his painting, the name of Peggy’s gallery, how much Tony had spent (a number that was, frankly, terrifying), but finally, toward the bottom, was contact information, and a phone number. 

And maybe it was the beer in his veins, or the fact that he could hear his high school best friend having sex just one room over, or maybe it was the photos in his backpack. Whatever it was, it had Steve picking up his phone and typing the number into it. It wasn’t the same one as he had blocked before. 

He held the phone to his ear, listened to the dial tone, and tried to remember to breath. 

“You know who I am,” the voice on the other end said, a clear pre-recorded message before a shrill beep. 

“Hey, Tony,” Steve said, hating how inadequate those words sounded. “You, uh, bought my painting. That’s how I got your number.” He paused to wince. “Sorry if that’s, you know, creepy or anything. I have no idea what time it is where you are, or even, you know, where you are. But I’ve been, ah, I’ve...I miss you. Enough to make a long-distance call from London. Yeah. Bye.”

Steve ended the call and put his phone on the bedside table, as if not looking at it could undo what he had done. But even that much emotional turmoil could not stand up to all the drinks he had consumed that night, and so Steve was soon asleep, so asleep that he didn’t hear the way his phone vibrated for the next twenty minutes straight.


End file.
